What’s New in Autodesk Inventor 2017

It’s that time of year again to see what’s new in Autodesk’s Inventor 2017.Another pretty good release with new technology that are in line with where things are heading, a focus on cloud collaboration and enhancements that users have been requesting.

Below is a full list of what’s new, but here’s the top new things that I like and a short video of the Top Ten from Autodesk:

Circular Patterns – Set the orientation of the body or the feature set of the source, redefine the base point/feature set.

Sketch Driven Pattern – New sketch driven pattern command to create patterns of features or bodies based on 2D/3D sketches. You can also redefine the base point or pick faces and re-orientate the pattern

Circluar pattern

Sketch driven pattern

Surfacing

Boundary Patch – Guide rail is added so you can select curveshape the patch by electing points or curves.

The 3D sketch environment has been revamped making it easier to do 3D sketching with similar tools found in the Tube & Pipe routing module of Inventor.

New commands:

Align to Plane

Orient Z

Orient to World

Snap Intersection

New Controls:

Ortho mode

Dynamic dimension

Snap object

Infer constraints

Copy/Paste – You can copy/paste a 3D sketch entity in the same 3D sketch or between 3D sketches.

Drag Geometry – You can drag a 3D sketch by selecting any part of the sketch

New Constraints

On Face

Equal

Parallel with X,Y or Z Axis

Parallel to XY, YZ and XZ Planes

New 3D sketch constraints

Draw Curves on Face – By directly sketching it in place, you can create an interploated 3D spline on a parts face. The curve creation supports vertices, edges, constraints, point insertion, editing, curvature display and other options

Improved multi-threading – 2017 has had significant multi-threaded improvements when importing CATIA, Solidworks, NX and Pro-E/Creo files with more robustness when placed as a reference.

Property overrides – Select property overrides or revert back to the values from the source file and the override vaules display in the BoM

STEP Associativity

The AnyCAD functionality has extended to STEP files, so now if someone sends you a STEP file and modifies it, there is associativity and the changes will automatically update inside Inventor without having to re-import the file. This functionality not only works with STEP but 2D DWG, Autodesk Alias, Autodesk AutoCAD, Dassault Systemes Solidworks, Dassault Systemes CATIA V5 (I’m not aware of anything that is compatible to CATIA V6), PTC Creo, PTC Pro-Engineer and Siemens NX.

2D DWG Associativity Enhancements

With 2D DWG’s, the drawings in model space can be quite large and spanned in all sorts of directions within the coordinate system and can include borders, title blocks, attributes, dimensions and annotations. The new enhancements with DWG, allow the user to crop a section of the drawings and move that cropped section to a more manageable place in the Inventor environment (i.e. the origin 0,0,0).

The other enhancement is being able to place that dwg file in an Inventor part into an Inventor 2016 drawing as a view and maintain associativity between the dwg file and the Inventor drawing.